No Sex, No Funk, No Yellow Brick Road

Grant McLennan is an extremely unfunky Australian who in the course
of a 17-year career has come to value appealing melodies over all
other musical benisons, and Stateside, that would seem to make him
an impossible sell. So what if his current album is his most
consistently catchy ever, unrolling tune after sweet, simple tune
for 77 minutes? The idea of a balding, pudgy, over-35
traditionalist holding his own on SoundScan is palpably ridiculous.
Just ask Elton John.

As far as I'm concerned, McLennan already belongs in the rock
and roll history books. I obviously wouldn't be writing about him
if I didn't prefer him to John, whose focus on tunes is so single-minded
he lets Bernie Taupin write his lyrics. And this preference
is absolute when it comes to the elder Elton--the Elton whose
annual hit or three has bored us unconscious since around the time
McLennan met Robert Forster at Brisbane University in 1977.
McLennan's calm, felt, modestly acerbic style of intelligence makes
for a livelier maturity than Elton's shrewd if heartfelt appetite
for bathos. But after six months of listening with great
admiration, moderate wonder, and not enough excitement to
Horsebreaker Star, I can think of a few Eltonesque qualities
McLennan could use--qualities like vulgarity, ambition, greed, and
a dexterous right hand, not to mention a trace of funk. Pop music
takes more than tunes and smarts. It takes pizzazz. And if McLennan
is ever to escape the cult status he's sick of, which if you want
to be realistic about it isn't bloody likely, he'd better pick some
up somewhere.

Horsebreaker Star is certainly the most impressive of
McLennan's three solo albums. The first one, Watershed, puts more
flex into its slick than it gets credit for. But since it sold not
at all here, Atlantic's failure to release 1993's more studio-static
Fireboy is defensible. Expecting a record company to behave
like a foundation for the arts is a waste of hope. If the attendant
penny-pinchers were to back a tour with the quartet McLennan
brought to the Mercury Lounge July 5, his accrued ink and rep might
feed a groundswell. But since he couldn't fill a small venue in the
nation's largest "alternative" market, chances are it wouldn't. As
remarkable as Horsebreaker Star is in some ways, it matters more
than your average regrettable bad-seller for one reason above all--the
Go-Betweens.

You have to feel for McLennan, who wishes he could put his
band behind him. He's not even stupid or bitter about it--doesn't
badmouth the music, claims friendly relations with all ex-members,
still collaborates with Forster sometimes, performed "Was There
Anything I Could Do" and the indelibly inspiring "Right Here" at
the Merc. And it's not as if they broke up prematurely. A dozen
years on, after Forster and McLennan emigrated to London to fulfill
a potential everyone swore was there and then failed utterly to
break through after they'd done their part of the job, they went on
a major tour with the far wealthier R.E.M., which seems to have
been fairly harrowing for all the sensitive types involved. The
headliners wouldn't venture out together again for five years, and
that was a luxury the Aussies couldn't afford. Although some would
claim they were R.E.M.'s artistic equals, which I'd call a slight
exaggeration, they were one step beyond day jobs, and Forster and
McLennan's relationships with drummer Lindy Morrison and
violinist-oboeist-singer Amanda Brown were falling apart. It was a sane time
to pack it in. Soon, McLennan and Forster were back in Brisbane.

But while the Go-Betweens never got rich--never, in fact,
enjoyed a major hit anywhere in the world--their always
considerable cult is probably bigger than ever. This cult is
usually explained as a function of the songs, and since the band
amassed the best book of the '80s, songs are the root of it.
Forster did all the writing at first--e.g. the early "Karen," which
adores a librarian who provides all the help he needs: "Helps me
find Hemingway/Helps me find Genet/Helps me find Brecht/Helps me
find Chandler." Unfortunately, the casual shopper can only find
that one on the cassette version of the 1978-1990 compilation that
now comprises their U.S. catalogue--a compilation loaded with
obscurities that, while replacing too many lissome faves, prove how
deep their talents ran. The secret of that depth is credits that
read Forster-McLennan, and over the years, as McLennan's voice
became more prominent, so did the melodies. Only cultists
recognized such distinctions, however. Beyond its fallacy of scale,
the standard Lennon/McCartney = Forster/McLennan equation ignores
the inconvenient fact that neither Go-Between could outsing George
Harrison in the shower. And not until the final album, 16 Lovers
Lane, were the tunes unmistakably surefire--by which time, many
cultists would hold, the Go-Betweens' desire for a hit was
distorting their priorities. They were trying to gloss over the
tensions that made their songs exciting.

For miraculously, they were no longer merely or even mainly a
writing combine--through more personnel changes than meant a damn
thing, they had coalesced into a true group. The grooves were
sharper, deeper, sometimes . . . jagged?; whatever, they were
there. The arrangements interlocked, with Amanda Brown's apparently
extraneous classical touches often integral as hook or rhythm
trick. As you can see on the droll little Video Singles collection,
they were manifesting dollops of personality and showmanship--Forster went
in for gawky drag, and while maybe Brown wasn't what
you'd call a looker, definitely she wasn't what you'd call camera
shy. The chemistry of the two resident couples bubbled underneath.
And most important, the two not quite adequate male voices added up
in practice to a single smart and likable one. McLennan's workaday
singer-songwriter chops and Forster's low-pitched demo-style near-recitative
were so short on recognition factors that even fans had
to concentrate to figure out who was at the mike. Their musical
rough spots fit together nicely. And they were both unobtrusively
literate residents of the showbiz-bohemian fringe, good at homely
metaphor, compressed narrative, and legible if oblique emotion: "I
feel so sure about our love I write a song about us/Breaking up"
(Forster), or "When a woman learns to walk she's not dependent
anymore/A line from her diary, July 24" (McLennan). The total
effect was of one exceptionally intelligent and multifaceted
subject. The Go-Betweens were too subtle withal. But there was
plenty there for the getting.

By synchronicity, McLennan and Forster's three solo releases appeared
more or less simultaneously, highlighting how distinct the
two really are. Forster cemented his weirdo reputation on three
off-key albums of studio-rock (Danger in the Past), country-rock
(the import-only Calling From a Country Phone), and cover versions
(I Had a New York Girlfriend, with Martha and the Muffins' "Echo
Beach" hardly the most recondite choice). McLennan, meanwhile, made
clear who had dominated the mechanical 16 Lovers Lane by turning
into a rather out-of-date pop pro. However impeccable McLennan's
writing, the production of New Zealand folk-rocker Dave Dobbyn
reimagined the Oz of the '90s as the El Lay of the '70s, and if the
attempt almost came off musically, it was a lousy way to sell
records--the typical miscalculation of a pop intellectual whose
formative musical experiences determine his notion of the
commerciality he thinks he loves so much. In that context,
McLennan's latest brainstorm is a step in the right direction. On
its own, though, it's eccentric in the extreme. McLennan cut
Horsebreaker Star by getting off the plane in Georgia and in nine
days recording 30 songs, every damn one he had, with musicians he'd
never met. The producer, whom he'd also never met, was R.E.M. buddy
John Keane, which makes sense both saleswise and soundwise except
that R.E.M. is R.E.M. and McLennan isn't--he lacks their rhythm
section, their guitarist, their vocalist, and their brand name. At
the Merc, McLennan announced (untruthfully, I presume) that "Simone
and Perry" was number four in Paraguay and French Guiana. Too bad,
he noted in his usual deadpan, us Yanks were so out of it.

In its U.S. variant, Horsebreaker Star borrows one track off
Fireboy while dropping six titles from the worldwide double-CD.
McLennan is writing so well that although the omissions are
understandable, every one is worth hearing. And there's another
drawback too--the reconstituted album seems even more uniform than
the original, shortchanging the subdued unhookiness that in other
respects is a strength. Like classic Go-Betweens, Horsebreaker Star
gives up its pleasures gradually, mmm by mmm and aha by aha. But if
at times it seems virtually inexhaustible, at other times it seems
virtually boring. The sweet production touches go with the flow
from synths to strings to Syd Straw, there are too many backing
vocals and not enough licks, and McLennan isn't singer enough to
put his resigned fables and snapshots of a grownup romantic in the
relief they deserve. Even at the Merc, where he delighted me by
showing up with a strong-voiced female electric guitarist who
disappointed me by doubling the chords he was strumming on his
amplified acoustic, I didn't find myself gulping down the lyrics as
voraciously as I'd hoped. It was just tuneful verse, tunefuler
chorus, strum-bam-thank-you-ma'am. McLennan told us how Eric
Clapton asked him the secret of one "figger--that's a technical
term," and shouted "Lead break" as he took an abstraction of a
solo. Robert always was the main guitarist.

Yet in the end, as cultists know and too few others will find
out, the lyrics are worth digesting. If my favorite line involves,
of all things, songs--"Really loved the one about those L.A.
freaks/Did it take a day to write or was it weeks?"--that's only to
say he knows more about them than the competition. And he does love
words. In fact, his most significant Forster collaboration these
days is a movie script, which whatever its commercial prospects--"If I
say these four words, immediately all the producers and
studios are going to not be interested: no sex, no violence"--is a
sign that he's onto something. Ask yourself, how many rock and
rollers have left a good band to embark on a better solo run? Not
John Lennon, not John Lydon, not hardly anybody. Van Morrison, only
Them was really his backup group. Bjork, conceivably, if you like
that sort of thing. And of course, Neil Young. The thing is, in a
just history book the Go-Betweens would loom larger than Buffalo
Springfield. And no matter how much you love him, the better half
of the best songwriting team of the '80s still ain't Neil Young.